Many enterprise applications must interact with human users through a variety of media. For example, applications, such as e-commerce, customer relationship management, supply chain and crisis management applications, often interact with a user using one or more of voice, electronic mail, conferencing, instant messaging or text messaging communications media.
Traditionally, developers of such enterprise applications had to integrate the applications with a variety of communication servers that implement the desired communication media. Generally, developers were required to have a thorough understanding of the complex details of the required protocols and devote a substantial part of the application development effort to the integration with communication servers. In addition, developers were required to address the convergence of communication capabilities across protocols and media, i.e., the extension of capabilities from one communication protocol and medium to others and the alignment of similar, yet incongruous capabilities across different protocols and media.
The challenges only increase when a conference must be established among a plurality of participants. In particular, the developer of an enterprise application must typically deal with integration issues for a greater number of participants who may be spread across a number of different domains, potentially requiring knowledge of different protocols and media types for each participant. In addition, even after the developer has addressed the protocol and media issues for each potential participant, the proliferation of different media types and devices for each user presents the problem of the best way to bring people together on a conference. Users may be present on one or more devices depending on location, environment, and preference.
For example, there is little point in conferencing an important customer group with their assigned salesperson on the salesperson's office phone if the salesperson is away at a conference. The salesperson may be available for instant messages (IM) and the launch of an IM conference may be more appropriate at that time. However, when the salesperson is at the office, the salesperson may prefer a voice conference on the office phone with a customer group rather than using an IM. Further, the establishment of the conference may still fail due to the inability of a media type to support the requirements of the conference, such as document sharing or a video link, or due to the unavailability of a necessary artifact (such as a required document). For example, it is premature to schedule a conference concerning an insurance claim if the required claim documentation is unavailable. Hence, the static determination of the media type of a conference results in unnecessary failed communications.
A need therefore exists for methods and apparatus for establishing a conference based on the presence or preferences (or both) of one or more invitees. A further need exists for methods and apparatus for establishing a conference based on the requirements of the conference, which may include necessary infrastructure and artifact availability.